A friend recently wrote me about Near Death Experiences (NDE) after seeing the moving Heaven is For Real. Here is my response:
I saw the movie, Heaven
is For Real, and found it very interesting. I have some ambivalence on
this topic of life after death. On the one hand I am enthusiastically interested in compiling
evidence for the reality of ongoing consciousness; but on the other hand, I see
the phenomenon as easy to "cash in on" by anyone who has some unusual
experience of altered consciousness. Human history is rife with people who make money off of the supernatural and the promise of certainty regarding life beyond the grave. I am really more fascinated by the fact
that so many of us take the topic seriously--pro or con. I see no skeptics
working feverishly to refute the existence of Santa Claus or Tooth Fairies.
There is "something" more substantial to this NDE stuff. But mystery
and room for doubt is also significant. The ambiguity seems to coincide with a
soul-making cosmology—lots of room for doubt, yet ultimately right and wrong
choices to be made. I lean toward being a believer--partly because of my own
experiences.
Also, I was glad the author included the "negative"
side of NDE and afterlife stories. I had something like a NDE in 1994, but the
persons who came to me were not friendly. They were glowing 3-D holographic
light persons who came to show me the terror of dying in a state of unresolved
despair. Their message, in part, was: "If you die now, you will enter into
a state of unimaginable suffering." It was clear that such a state was not
due to some divine decree for my sinfulness, but rather a necessary concomitant
of my state of mind and life at the time. It was more like the Buddhist Bhardo found
in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Duat of Egyptian mythology, or Dante's
Purgatorio, or the characters on the bus in C.S. Lewis's The Great
Divorce. The beings were comprised of dazzling light, but were messengers
of terror. They called themselves Middlings--beings caught between paradise and
hell; and their mission was to help people "on the edge" make a
decision about which direction they want to take--into deeper darkness or into
light. After meeting with them, I was "scared straight". They
literally scared the existential hell out of me, causing my soul and life to
change radically. In addition, N.D.E. expert P. M. H. Atwater's The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences: The Ultimate Guide
to What Happens When We Die makes it clear that many return
from NDEs with messages of judgment and terror--however, such accounts do not
typically sell very well.
So, if I take the "stages of consciousness" theory as
a true paradigm, then the possibility (if not sure reality) of a kind of stage
three disintegration has to be included in the post-life equation as well as
this life. The Mary Poppins optimism of the New Age folks is just as disturbing
to me as the Christian (Muslim) consignment of all non-believers to eternal
hell. A life of soul-making in a world of moral choices and evolving human
freedom requires consequences for all conscious choices. This fact has been a
quality of every ancient mythology (not just Christian). The Hindus, Buddhists,
Muslims,, Egyptians, Mesopotamians et. al. have a terrifying place for those
who have lived badly and chosen selfishly. The Greeks had Hades. Even the
mythical skeptical philosopher Plato spoke of an above and below in his Republic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er I do tend to think the terrible aspects are remedial and purposeful, but just as necessary as the light and butterflies.
Bottom line: the topic fascinates us, and people seem to have a
psycho-spiritual category (brain gurus would call it a neural niche) for this
stuff. That tends to give the phenomenon more than a little credence as
cosmologically possible if not probable. C.S. Lewis noted that there is no yearning within natural human consciousness which does not have the possibility of being filled--i.e. hunger, thirst, sex, material gain, fame, etc. The quest goes on.